Quotes & Sayings About Absence Of Love

Peace is not the absence of poverty
But the presence of love for beauty — Debasish Mridha

Love, it's such a night, laced with running water, irreparable, riddled with a million leaks. A night shaped like a shadow thrown by your absence. Every crack trickles, every overhang drips. The screech of nighthawks has been replaced by the splash of rain. The rain falls from the height of streetlights. Each drop contains its own shattering blue bulb. — Stuart Dybek

In two of your poems you called that central
Passage of womanhood a wound,
Instead of a curtain guarding a silken
Trail of sighs. How many men,
Upon regarding such beauty, helplessly
Touching it, recklessly needing
To enter its warmth again and again,
Have assumed it embodies their own ache
Of absence, the personal
Gash that has punished their lives.
So endowed of anatomy, any woman
Who has been loved
Knows that her tenderest blush
Of tissue is a luxe burden of have.
Although it bleeds, this is only to cleanse,
To prepare yet another nesting for love.
It is not a wound, friend.
It is a home for you.
It is a way into the world. — Michele Wolf

I bow in reverence before the emotions of every melted heart ... The more intense the delight in their presence, the more poignant the impression of their absence ... When the tears of bereavement have had their natural flow, they lead us again to life and love's generous joy. — James Martineau

But what happened in Heaven? What did you do there? After a while, didn't you crave flaws? Love and lust and misunderstandings,, and maybe even a little violence to liven things up? Didn't light need shade? Didn't it? Maybe it didn't. Maybe I was missing the point. Maybe the point was to exist with an absence of pain. Yes, to exist with an absence of pain. Yes, maybe that was the only aim you needed in life. It certainly had been, but what happened if you'd never required that aim because you were born after their goal had been met? — Matt Haig

You and I are the sum of a void left by the absence of someone we love. — Jennifer Rush

Consider my Lover; the yellow church
of his skin, the clean wells of his ears;
How the notes of a song come to him
like birds descending on a power line;
How in his absence I am of two
throats
each of them cramped. — Cecilia Llompart

Have we ever thought to consider that the need to be loved grows because of its absence, but that love also grows because of its presence? And does this not speak to the power of love? — Craig D. Lounsbrough

If we linger in indecision, as does Buridan's beast, we will not perish. We will simply miss an opportunity to act decisively in the absence of certainty, and show that our fear of error is greater than our love of truth. — Terryl Givens

Substitution is a true test of strength. The real performance of a player is seen not only during playing time but also and more especially when the player is substituted. — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

You tell me there is no fighting or hatred or desire in the Town. That is a beautiful dream, and I do want your happiness. But the absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without despair or loss, there is no hope. — Haruki Murakami

He gains the farthest reaches where the ache of our most ancient absence lay. — Scott Cairns

The signs of the soundness of the servant's love for his Lord are three: absence of self-willing; pleasure in every event which takes place through divine decree; and seeing the perfection of the Beloved in everything and being content with Him in everything through submission to Him in all things. — Ibn Ata Allah

And of course anyone who could see him here now, with his fever and his sleeping bags, his eyephones and his cellular data port and his bottle of cooling piss, would think he was crazy too. But he isn't. He knows he isn't, in spite of everything. He has the syndrome now, the thing that came after every test subject from that Gainesville orphanage, but he isn't crazy. Just obsessed. And the obsession has its own shape in his head, its own texture, its own weight. He knows it from himself, can differentiate, so he goes back to it whenever he needs to and checks on it. Monitors it. Makes sure it still isn't him. It reminds him of having a sore tooth, or the way he felt once when he was in love and didn't want to be. How his tongue always found the tooth, or how he'd always find that ache, that absence in the shape of the beloved. But — William Gibson

I think living with the absence of someone we love is like living in front of a mountain from which a person - a speck in the distance, on some distance ridge - is perpetually waving. — Simon Van Booy

His eyes, usually as black and hard as obsidian were softer now, with the sheen of a crow's wing in sunlight. "You love me anyway," she teased.
"That's true," he said softly.
"Your weakness," she replied in equally quiet tones.
"No. My strength." They made love, this time without the power of their combined Gifts flowing hot between them, yet Martise would argue with anyone that its absence made no difference. There was sorcery aplenty in loving the one you held most dear. — Grace Draven

Whether the pain you face now is the consequence of your sin or the sin of others, in God's providence and in saving faith, Romans 8:28 still reigns: "God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose." It is not the absence of sin that makes you a believer. It is the presence of Christ in the midst of your struggle that commends the believer and sets you apart in the world. — Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

YOU MUSTN'T BE AFRAID OF DEATH
you're a deathless soul
you can't be kept in a dark grave
you're filled with God's glow
be happy with your beloved
you can't find any better
the world will shimmer
because of the diamond you hold
when your heart is immersed
in this blissful love
you can easily endure
any bitter face around
in the absence of malice
there is nothing but
happiness and good times
don't dwell in sorrow my friend
ghazal number 2594 — Rumi

It is possible to rise to the lofty standard set by the Lord for priesthood holders in making decisions in quorums. It is possible when there is great faith and love and the absence of contention. — Henry B. Eyring

I cannot live without you. For to attempt to do so would be to rob both of us of each other, and that is thievery of the greatest sort. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

I lose thee, to find thee back again and again, My beloved.
Thou leavest me, that I may receive thee all the more, when thou returnest.
Thou canst vanish behind the moment's screen Only because thou art mine for evermore, My beloved.
When I go in search of thee, my heart trembles, spreading ripples across my love.
Thou smilest through thy disguise of utter absence, and my tears sweeten thy smile. — Rabindranath Tagore

He was looking for immensity. His life was hopelessly small, everything surrounding him was nondescript and gray. And death is absolute; it is indivisible and indissoluble.
The presence of the girl was pathetic (a few caresses and a lot of meaningless words), but her absolute absence was infinitely grand; when he imagined a girl buried in a field, he suddenly discovered the nobility of pain and the grandeur of love.
But it was not only the absolute but also bliss he was looking for in his dreams of death. — Milan Kundera

Anger is not the absence of love. Anger broke you apart. Love and anger wrap around each other and becomes one living thing inside your heart. — Lisa Unger

She should have remembered that people have given everything they own, everything they are, to be taken care of, and to have their pain gone. It's the lure of cults: the promise of a good family; it's what people think love is, but love isn't absence of pain, it's a hand to hold while you're going through it. — Laurell K. Hamilton

According to the biblical tradition the absence of work
idleness
was a condition of the first man's state of blessedness before the Fall. The love of idleness has been preserved in fallen man, but now a heavy curse lies upon him, not only because we have to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow, but also because our sense of morality will not allow us to be both idle and at ease. Whenever we are idle a secret voice keeps telling us to feel guilty. If man could discover a state in which he could be idle and still feel useful and on the path of duty, he would have regained one aspect of that primitive state of blessedness. And there is one such state of enforced and irreproachable idleness enjoyed by an entire class of men
the military class. It is this state of enforced and irreproachable idleness that forms the chief attraction of military service, and it always will. — Leo Tolstoy

Just the absence of loneliness. That's love enough. — John Rechy

I lost myself in the burden of trying to be your savior. — Alexandria Hampton

It's not love that the past needs in order to survive, it's an absence of choices. — Susan Sontag

Evil does not exist sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is not like faith, or love that exist just as does light and heat. Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God's love present in his heart. It's like the cold that comes when there is no heat or the darkness that comes when there is no light. — Albert Einstein

The Phoenix burns and rebirths from the ashes in the absence of need for witness, acceptance, understanding or belief. — Truth Devour

I love luxury. And luxury lies not in richness and ornateness but in the absence of vulgarity. Vulgarity is the ugliest word in our language. I stay in the game to fight it. — Coco Chanel

Do you think it's easy for me? No, I don't remember you. I don't remember holding you or talking to you or falling in love with you - but I walk around with a giant hole in my heart all the time. I feel your absence every second of the day. It aches and nothing soothes it. Losing you is bad enough, but I don't even get the comfort of remembering that I had you once.
-Haden — Gwen Hayes

Like all young people, he has no idea who his parents really are; for eighteen years he has experienced their existence only insofar as it has related to his own needs. Suddenly his mind is full of questions. What do they talk about when he's not around? What secrets do they hold from each other, what aspirations have been left to languish? What private grievances, held in check by the shared project of child rearing, will now, in his absence, lurch into the light? They love him, but do they love each other? Not as parents or even husband and wife but simply as people - as surely they must have loved each other at one time? He hasn't the foggiest; he can no more grasp these matters than he can imagine the world before he was alive. — Justin Cronin

A great measure of the real value of the things we have is how we feel when such things become scarce and absent in our lives — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Everyone's last wish turned out to be love: may I be consumed by the simplicity and purity of a love story, any love, base love or heroic love or transgressive love or love that is a blind and lame and ridiculous lie - anything the opposite of alone and lonely and sexless, and the absence of someone to care about or talk to. — Lidia Yuknavitch

A feeling that He's right here with you or that you're miles apart, is the difference of a prayer with love, or with an absence of the heart. — Lisa Mischelle Wood

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but it sure makes the rest of you lonely. — Charles M. Schulz

For the most part, mental illness is caused by an absence of or defect in the love that a particular child required from its particular parents for successful maturation and spiritual growth. It — M. Scott Peck

The truth is always more powerful and stronger than love, because the love becomes powerless in the absence of the truth. — Anuj

The image of love reveals itself there; in a profoundly present absence. — Mahmoud Darwish

Modern amorists are sometimes taken aback at the prospect of investing in a relationship with no guarantee of reward. It is precisely that absence, however, that separates gift from shrewdness. Love cannot be extracted, commanded, demanded, or wheedled. It can only be given. (208) — Thomas Lewis

Absence is the enemy of love and the friend of friendship. — C.J. Langenhoven

My hope is not in the absence of suffering and comfort returned. My hope is in the presence of the One who promises never to leave or forsake, the One who declares nothing "will be able to separate us from the love of God" (Rom. 8:39). Nothing. — Kara Tippetts

Love is a funny thing, isn't it? The presence of it can bring you to save a foe, the absence of it can make you hurt your own flesh. — Stefanie Schneider

Only what is seen, appreciated, and loved will be missed in its absence which makes humans creatures of habit — Aloysius Jnr

This responsibility, in the case of the mother and her infant, refers mainly to the care for physical needs. In the love between adults it refers mainly to the psychic needs of the other person. Responsibility could easily deteriorate into domination and possessiveness, were it not for a third component of love, respect. Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accord- ance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect means the concern that the other per- son should grow and unfold as he is. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me. If I love the other person, I feel one with him or her, but with him as he is, not as I need him to be as an object for my use. — Anonymous

Quit worrying about hell or dreaming about heaven as they are both present inside this very moment. Why worry so much about the aftermath, an imaginary future, when this very moment is the only time we can truly and fully experience the presence and absence of God in our lives? Motivated by neither the fear of punishment nor the desire to be rewarded in heaven, Sufis love God simply because they love him. — Elif Shafak

The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child. Love, being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, requires the developement of humility, objectivity and reason.
I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behavior, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person's reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears. — Erich Fromm

Three hundred nights like three hundred walls
must rise between my love and me
and the sea will be a black art between us.
Time with a hard hand will tear out
the streets tangled in my breast.
Nothing will be left but memories.
(O afternoons earned with suffering,
nights hoping for the sight of you,
dejected vacant lots, poor sky
shamed in the bottom of the puddles
like a fallen angel ...
And your life that graces my desire
and that run-down and lighthearted neighborhood
shining today in the glow of my love ... )
Final as a statue
your absence will sadden other fields. — Jorge Luis Borges

Darkness is the absence of light. Happiness is the absence of pain. Anger is the absence of joy. Jealousy is the absence of confidence. Love is the absence of doubt. Hate is the absence of peace. Fear is the absence of faith. Life is the absence of death. — Jess Bowen

It has been further suggested that the absence of love is the major cause of mental illness and that the presence of love is consequently the essential healing element in psychotherapy. This — M. Scott Peck

What we call evil is the absence of Light, of love, in all cases. — Gary Zukav

Indeed, among the lesser auxiliaries to success in love, an absence, the declining of an invitation to dinner, an unintentional, unconscious harshness are of more service than all the cosmetics and fine clothes in the world. — Marcel Proust

As a geologist, I love Earth observations, but it is ridiculous to tie this objective to a 'consensus' that humans are causing global warming when human experience, geologic data and history, and current cooling can argue otherwise. 'Consensus,' as many have said, merely represents the absence of definitive science. You know as well as I, the 'global warming scare' is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making. — Harrison Schmitt

Certain coincidence is wonderful. Certain meetings are memorable. Sometimes you meet some people for just a moment and they leave indelible footprints on your mind. They give you the reasons to ponder over and over. They become your food for thought. Though they go, their presence is felt within the innermost of the heart and the soul; especially when such people were a reason for a smile, or they were a perfect fit for a vacuum or probably they were a heavenly sent or maybe they were an epitome of a great union; when their light could shine to brighten the dark side of our lives; when they knew how to arouse interest even in the face of dull atmosphere; when they did understand silence and know the value and power of words; when even their absence is felt more than their presence. You can't just forget about such people. Though they leave, they live within our hearts, mind, body and soul. — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Peace is not only the absence of violence, but the presence of love, kindness, compassion and harmony. — Debasish Mridha

You just know something is amiss, when you look at someone and long for something that is not yours or you cannot have. It's an absence
a loss of a heartbeat. — Nadege Richards

It is far easier to talk about loss than it is to talk about love. It is easier to articulate the pain of love's absence than to describe its presence and meaning in our lives. — Bell Hooks

No amount of scholastic attainment, of able and profound exposition of brilliant and stirring eloquence can atone for the absence of a deep impassioned sympathetic love for human souls. — David Brainerd

Real love is the complete absence of any negative feelings towards anyone. — Mata Amritanandamayi

No tongue is able to declare the greatness of the love that Jesus bears to every soul: and therefore this Spouse, when he would leave this earth, in order that his absence might not cause us to forget him, left us as a memorial this Blessed Sacrament, in which he himself remained; for he would not that there should be any other pledge to keep alive our remembrance of him than he himself. — Peter Of Alcantara

The mistakes of my youth have allowed me to see what true love is through the experience of its absence. They have allowed me to see that love is not a feeling but an action. It is the laying down of one's life for the beloved. It is not the laying down of someone else's life or body for our own gratification. Ultimately, as a Christian, I have come to see that love is not merely an action but a commandment. We are commanded to love the Lord our God and to love our neighbor - and our enemy. Clearly true love has nothing to do with selfishness in any — Joseph Pearce

You are wrong if you think you cannot live without love. I cannot live without it. I do not mean that I go into a decline, develop odd symptoms, became a caricature. I mean that I cannot live well without it. I cannot think or act or speak or write or even dream with any kind of energy in the absence of love. I feel excluded from the living world. I become cold, fish-like, immobile. I implode. — Anita Brookner

the absence of love and belonging will always lead to suffering. It — Brene Brown

He'd woken up to the absence of Mathilde in the bed, grief in the coolness where her heat should have been. — Lauren Groff

The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of incessant proximity. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Peace is not the absence of agony
But the presence of joy of harmony — Debasish Mridha

The contradiction is resolved when you realize that for Jesus peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle, but the presence of love. -p83 — Frederick Buechner

Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused. — Henry Adams

The absence of violence is not love. — A.S. King

To observe people in conflict is a necessary part of a child's education. It helps him to understand and accept his own occasional hostilities and to realize that differing opinions need not imply an absence of love. — Milton Sapirstein

Yet Clare's love was doubtless ethereal to a fault, imaginative to impracticability. With these natures, corporeal presence is sometimes less appealing than corporeal absence; the latter creating an ideal presence that conveniently drops the defects of the real. — Thomas Hardy

Pure love is the best medicine for the modern world. This is what is lacking in all societies. The root cause of all problems, from personal problems to global problems is the absence of love. Love is the binding factor, the unifying factor. Love creates the feeling of oneness among people. It unifies a nation and its people. Love creates a sense of unity while hatred causes division. Egotism and hatred cuts people's minds into pieces. Love should rule. There is no problem which love cannot solve. — Mata Amritanandamayi

The absence of life is not the same as material privation: we will never again see the same soul occupying the same space. The world refers to them as pets, but that is what we do, not really what they are. Affection pays for itself in proportion to the love we offer, and if the love we lavished on him was any indication, we are inconsolable. The suffering is more on our side now, for he led an enormously happy and productive life, and we are left to remember and agonize. It is all wretchedness now. Grief is the currency for death, leaving us in emotional debt perhaps forever, but love is the tax we happily pay toward the investment of another's company, and we would all rather pay it and be happy and poor than be rich in a friendless life. He is gone, and we are now beholden to him, but we are so much happier for his having been here than we deserve to be.
On the death of Ted, beloved cat — Michelle Franklin

Love is the absence of Anxiety. — Wilhelm Reich

Katy, that the whole world can be involved in this madness we call war, and all the while the flowers and the bees and the seasons keep on doing what they must, wise but never weary in their wait for humanity to come to its senses and remember the beauty of life? It is queer, but my love and longing for the world are always deepened by my absence from it; it's wondrous, don't you think, that a person can swing from despair to gleeful hunger, and that even during these dark days there is happiness to be found in the smallest things?) Anyway, — Kate Morton

In the absence of a widely practiced and capable attention to our use of the land, to the land-use economies, and to the natural sources of our life, we have a national, or global, economy consisting entirely of capital (rated at monetary value), minimal labor ("jobs," merely numbered, and the numbers always liable to reduction by technology), information (infinite perhaps, but never sufficient), marketing (seduction of the gullible), and consumption (conversion of goods into waste or poison). And so we have lost patriotism in the old sense of love for one's country, and have replaced it with an ignorant, hard-hearted military-industrial nationalism that devours the country. Under — Wendell Berry

We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don't function as were meant to be. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache ... The absence of love and belonging will always lead to suffering. — Brene Brown

Courage is not the absence of fear. Hope is not the absence of trouble. Joy is not the absence of pain. Love is not the absence of obstacles. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Affiiction makes God appear to be absent for a time, more absent than a dead man, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell. A kind of horror submerges the whole soul. During this absence there is nothing to love. What is terrible is that if, in this darkness where there is nothing to love, the soul ceases to love, God's absence becomes final. — Simone Weil

Someday, the people we know, are acquainted to become the people we knew. They leave. They leave to pursue the opportunities laid down in their paths and they leave on account of misunderstandings.
Their absence causes a vacuum, a space, an incompleteness which we believe no one can fill. But someday, someone eventually does and that someone rekindles our hopes for companionship, until the circle continues and is ultimately intervened by the permanence of death.
The future is alarming, as atrocious as the past. And the friendship, the love, the memories either remain in our hearts cherished or are forgotten like an undeserving dream.
Everything eventually fades away, either for the better or worse.
Someday, the people we know, are acquainted to become the people we knew.
But then again, that someday is not today and so we must be a little more appreciative, for the moment, for the times, for the present because someday everything is going to change. — Chirag Tulsiani

To find love in Paris you must go down among those classes where the absence of education and of vanity, and the struggle for bare necessities, have allowed more energy to survive. — Stendhal

Hope? Hope is not the absence of tragedy, my friend. It is the conviction that tragedy can be endured. Hope is the spark in you that is not subdued in the face of the vast and callous indifference of the universe. Hope is that which is not shattered by hardship. Hope is the urge to fight what is wrong even when you know it will destroy you. Hope is the decision to love and need someone knowing that they will one day die. For me to promise that there are no obstacles would be the cruelest lie I could possibly tell. That lie is not hope. Hope is the will which needs no lies. — Travis Beacham

Four years ago the clocks started turning back. I open my eyes and see nothing. I feel nothing below or above me. I feel the absence of things. The absence of my flesh, my bones, my body, my mind. All that is left is awareness. I see nothing but the absence of colour. It's not a black darkness. It's simply nothing. The interior of a black hole. I recall news of a black hole lingering along the edges of our solar system. All that time ago. Four years ago. When the clocks started turning back. I hear nothing. Until there is a something. A small thing. A voice. I listen. There are more voices. The sounds are human. How long has it been since I've heard a human? The sounds scratch along my now present attention. They carve into my hearing. They are horrid, wretched things. Voices screaming. Growing loud and desperate. How many voices? Billions. This is the birth of our species. We are born screaming. It's all we know to do. We have screamed for eternity. Within this empty space. — F.K. Preston

You, who only know love when in love, do not ask what it is, nor do you look for it. But when a woman once asked you if you were in love with love itself, you were evasive and escaped by answering: I love you. She persisted: Do you not love love? You said: I love you, because of you. She left you, because you could not be trusted with her absence. Love is not an idea. It is an emotion that can cool down or heat up. It comes and goes. It is an embodied feeling and has five, or more, senses. Sometimes it appears as an angel with delicate wings that can uproot us from the earth. Sometimes it charges at us like a bull, hurls us to the ground, and walks away. At other times it is a storm we only recognize in its devastating aftermath. Sometimes it falls upon us like the night dew when a magical hand milks a wandering cloud. — Mahmoud Darwish

My reflections amount to a love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there. The things for which she was not there have her in them now more deeply because of her absence, and her effect on my way of seeing them. Anytime I note her absence from a thing, she arrives at once, as if summoned, entrenching herself more deeply than she exists in my memories of times when she was there, so that time, the sequence of what really happened, seems to curve around her. — Olivia Sudjic

Nor did I grasp the capacity of love's absence to destroy, that my lack of love for myself made my own life unbearable. You take someone whose life experiences have taught them they're worthless, string them out on drugs, and you have one miserable person. How could I have given what I didn't have? It's hard to value another life when you view your own as dispensable, hard to understand how you can have so great an effect on someone else when you don't think you matter. — Mia Fontaine

I am reminded of the proverb about the man with a single teacup to fetch water for his plants. In order to keep some alive, he had to let others die or run himself ragged. I have chosen to water this particular plant despite all its thorns, and I must simply hope my relationship with Tom can survive my absence. — Stacey Lee

Becoming more flexible, open-minded, having a capacity to deal with change is a good thing. But it is far from the whole story. Grandparents, in the absence of the social institutions that once demanded civilized behavior, have their work cut out for them. Our grandchildren are hungry for our love and approval, but also for standards being set. — Eda LeShan

Let love take hold of you and change you. At first through its presence then through its absence. — Elif Shafak

Peace is not only the absence of war, but the presence of harmony. — Debasish Mridha

Nothing reopens the springs of love so fully as absence, and no absence so thoroughly as that which must needs be endless. — Anthony Trollope

Absence - that common cure of love. — George Gordon Byron

The child must adapt to ensure the illusion of love, care, and kindness, but the adult does not need this illusion to survive. He can give up his amnesia and then be in a position to determine his actions with open eyes. Only this path will free him from his depression. Both the depressive and the grandiose person completely deny their childhood reality by living as though the availability of the parents could still be salvaged: the grandiose person through the illusion of achievement, and the depressive through his constant fear of losing "love." Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact. — Alice Miller

Everybody pays the heart lip service, of course, but everybody is more familiar with the absence of love than with its presence and gets so used to the feeling of emptiness that it becomes "normal." You don't miss the foundation of feeling until you begin to look for your self and can't find a support in the affects for a self. — Saul Bellow

That's where she saw Matt. It couldn't be him, she reasoned. He was in New York. Yet, it was him, she was sure. Same height, same broad shoulders, same mid-length, dark blonde hair. He dug an item out of his jean's pocket, crouched and looked around furtively. That's when he saw her. Putting the item back into his pocket, he rose, and walked to her slowly. "Am I dreaming?" she asked, barely breathing. He stopped inches from her. "We must be sharing the same dream." He bent and kissed her. It was a kiss full of longing after a difficult absence, full of love, warmth, and delicacy. She let him go and rested her head against his chest. "I — Anna Adams

She cursed Lovingdon for not taking her problem seriously, but then she supposed it wasn't truly a serious problem. No one would go hungry, be without shelter, or die because of her choice. And if she didn't choose, her parents weren't likely to disown her. She supposed she could live very happily without a husband, but it was the absence of love that was troubling. As far as she knew, no one had ever been madly, deeply, passionately in love with her. She believed that a woman should experience the mad rush of unbridled passion at least once in her lifetime. Was she being greedy to want it permanently? — Lorraine Heath

the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he's honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he's great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison. The — Ayn Rand

Sammy felt...that he would rather not love at all than be punished for loving. He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel. — Michael Chabon

Peace is not the absence of violence or war; it is the presence of kindness, compassion, love, and care. — Debasish Mridha